The next theory was that Freeview has changed something in the signal and that is causing the restarts. Dish TV provided me with a beta version of the 3.19 firmware and asked me to see if that solved the issue. It didn't.

Does your restart issue occur right after waking up the Magic TV from standby, i.e. displays video briefly then restart within 1 minute?

I upgraded to 5.07 (despite having a 3600) after reading a post on this thread a few pages back.

Unfortunately this has now made my crash issues worse. Box freezes frequently when trying to record shows. This appears most prevalent when waking from standby to record but i have seen it freeze when already on and a scheduled record has started. I have also seen it freeze when trying to rewind through a pre-recorded show. It gets stuck at a rewind speed, i cant stop it, start play or anything. Power cycle is required.

So basically upgrading to 5.07 on a 3600 has replaced my restarting issue with a freezing problem.

Ross55: I certainly will be upgrading the hard drive in the not to distant future I find 500GB just not quite enough, and from discussions here it will most likely be a Western digical red.

What's the preference for the Red Drives. They are designed for NAS operations.

Though very marginally quieter they're not noticeably more power efficient (run cooler).

They're rather pricier but offer a longer warranty period and are designed for more constant usage but -

As far as I can ascertain, they employ the advanced format mode which is definitely not recommended for the MTV3600s.

Sadly, I also found that the latest 2TB WD Caviar Green that I purchased also employs the Advanced Format Mode, so I'll have to ditch it and look again for a replacement drive.I've been trying to avoid 7200 drives due to the increased acoustic noise that they offer.

Ross55: I certainly will be upgrading the hard drive in the not to distant future I find 500GB just not quite enough, and from discussions here it will most likely be a Western digical red.

What's the preference for the Red Drives. They are designed for NAS operations.

Though very marginally quieter they're not noticeably more power efficient (run cooler).

They're rather pricier but offer a longer warranty period and are designed for more constant usage but -

As far as I can ascertain, they employ the advanced format mode which is definitely not recommended for the MTV3600s.

Sadly, I also found that the latest 2TB WD Caviar Green that I purchased also employs the Advanced Format Mode, so I'll have to ditch it and look again for a replacement drive.I've been trying to avoid 7200 drives due to the increased acoustic noise that they offer.

Ross55: I certainly will be upgrading the hard drive in the not to distant future I find 500GB just not quite enough, and from discussions here it will most likely be a Western digical red.

What's the preference for the Red Drives. They are designed for NAS operations.

Though very marginally quieter they're not noticeably more power efficient (run cooler).

They're rather pricier but offer a longer warranty period and are designed for more constant usage but -

As far as I can ascertain, they employ the advanced format mode which is definitely not recommended for the MTV3600s.

Sadly, I also found that the latest 2TB WD Caviar Green that I purchased also employs the Advanced Format Mode, so I'll have to ditch it and look again for a replacement drive.I've been trying to avoid 7200 drives due to the increased acoustic noise that they offer.

My preference is based on cache size (64MB), The fact it's got a longer warantee, is designed for long term running, and a vague thought that anything designed to be in an enclosure with others of it's kind had better play nice or fry.

Could you please enlighten me on the Advanced Format Mode? Especially it's implications for the Magic TV box.

My intention software willing is to format it externally in another computer (using some software I have) and then clone it, or perhaps software permitting just clone the thing and extend the data partition. I know this sounds like a cunning plan but will it work?

On a more general Note what is the reliability status of current drives on the market? I believe Seagate went through a bad patch a while back. In short are there any drives out there that you definitely shouldn't touch.

There is a move to format HDDs in 4K sectors and then when necessary to use a software utility to convert reads to emulate the standard 512 byte sector format. (Called 512e)

In this forum topic http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=83&topicid=62095 wklie wrote on 13 Nov."When buying a replacement HDD for MTV3600, drives larger than 2TB should not be used. Those using 4K sector "Advanced Format" (with "512e" 512-byte sector emulation) are not recommended.

I assume he was referring to this new format in general - not just as applied to >2TB drives.

PimpMyMagic: Sadly, I also found that the latest 2TB WD Caviar Green that I purchased also employs the Advanced Format Mode, so I'll have to ditch it and look again for a replacement drive.

Since you have already purchased an Advanced Format drive, in case it is not easy for you to return it and get another, here's some more information that may help.

The MTV3600 rescue format is neither designed nor tested for Advanced Format, so it will likely create misaligned partitions that would affect the drive performance. This is why it is not recommended. To workaround this limitation, you may use some freeware Linux bootable CD such as http://www.partedmagic.com to launch fdisk -H 224 -S 56 to create 4K-aligned partitions as follows:

PimpMyMagic: I run in "keep until space needed" mode and don't normally do any manual clearing, so ultimately I'll end up with near 2 TB of files in the JFS partition. (Even if most of them are in the "trash") Do you know if this is likely to have any bad effect on operations (like system slow down)?

Manually emptying trash is highly recommended. Keeping the HDD always full is undesirable.

bfginger:Their utility won't work with some of the newer drives but it's worth a try for anybody using a WD Green or Blue as the default behaviour isn't suitable unless they're in an external backup enclosure or battered Windows laptop.

Are you referring to WD's auto park disabling utility?

I intended using that if I had any problems. I know it does when the drives are used in a TiVo.

Yes, WDIDLE3http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqY5zlCXQmU210s should be fine in a PVR. Don't disable head parking entirely in newer WD desktop drives as that causes them to malfunction.

wklie: If you're buying the 2.5" HDD anyway, please try it and let us know. In general, 3.5" is recommended and it'd probably not be easy to mount the 2.5" securely inside the Magic TV anyway.

There are mounting brackets on the market that let 2.5" drives fit in 3.5" bays.

It wasn't until I put the Cinemastar 7K1000.C in a computer and it made more noise than everything else put together that I realised how just loud it was. Even if the Cinemastar 7K1000.D is much better it doesn't seem to be available in NZ.

The 1tb Red is the quietest drive I've come across by a big margin. I can't hear it at sitting distance with no background sound. Its idle power consumption should go down to about 2.1w with head parking enabled although I haven't tried that yet.

I haven't had any problems with using it so far. There is a performance penalty for using a 5400rpm drive optimised for acoustics and reliability but not severely and in general usage it isn't noticeable beyond there are slightly fewer frames when doing 32x FF. Editing is slower with a file edit that took 2:23 on the Cinemastar taking 3:15. I was able to record two HD streams while playing back a 1080p60 high bitrate file while downloading a file from the drive over the network.

I formatted the drive in Linux and copied the files across to it. The Magic TV does work with the main second partition being in EXT3. EXT3 is much less efficient than JFS so I don't think that's a good option unless you have some reason to use it. I'd be curious to know why the 3700 does.

Unfortunately finding a useful drive that doesn't employ 4k Advanced Format may be difficult as it's the new standard.

It would be informative to know whether the Magic TV supports the ATA-7 streaming command set. In a normal desktop drive the firmware will keep trying recover from an error as data correctness is placed above all else. In RAID systems this is a big problem as the failure of a drive to respond for 8s may see it marked as failed. Drives intended for RAID systems ship with TLER (time limited error recovery) timeouts of 7s set. With drives with supporting firmware the ATA-7 streaming command set can be used by software to limit the TLER to 0 or 0.1s when dealing with lossy files like television transmission stream recordings, as a few incorrect bytes cause no problems. AV drives intended for PVRs support the streaming commands. I think the information I read about such drives (including the Cinemastar) being unsafe in desktops is incorrect, and they only turn off normal error correction when specifically commanded to do so. http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/FEF3B52BFE9A054586256E66005AA389/$file/WP_AV_25March.pdfI'd guess that using a mainstream drive could occasionally lead to a crash or recording failure if it keeps trying to deal with an error indefinitely. Advanced users could do a badblocks run over first. With a 24/7 TLER 7s drive like the Reds I'd guess the firmware would buffer writes to the cache which would prevent problems. Is the Magic TV able to buffer recording to its Ram for a certain length of time if the drive doesn't respond?

The drive I would have prefered to get was the Seagate Pipeline HD 1tb drive (currently model ST1000VM002). It's even quieter than the Reds, runs at 5900rpm and supports the ATA-7 streaming command set. Unfortunately nobody is selling it in NZ. So you could ask about ordering it at your friendly computer shop but I don't think you'd have any luck. There is a Seagate Pipeline HD 1tb drive available here but it's an old 2009 model.

Seagate and WD don't seem to specify how many platters their AV drives have. But the newly released ST2000VM003 2tb Pipeline HD drive does appear to have 2 platters if third party sources are correct. Some but not all of the WD AV-GP 1tb drives with 64mb cache also have 1 platter. The AV-GP drives are WD Green drives with AV firmware.

It would be great if the Magic TV supported Power-up in standby. That would mean when the Magic TV was turned on from suspend mode there would be the option to have the hard drive's spindle only power up when needed. The hard drive often doesn't need to be on if the PVR is being used as a DVB-T receiver for the TV. Less use would reduce drive failures too.

bfginger: I formatted the drive in Linux and copied the files across to it. The Magic TV does work with the main second partition being in EXT3. EXT3 is much less efficient than JFS so I don't think that's a good option unless you have some reason to use it. I'd be curious to know why the 3700 does.

EXT3 is considered to be more reliable than jfs but it would be too slow to be used on MTV3600. JFS is chosen as a compromise between reliability and CPU overhead. The MTV3700 has a more powerful CPU so it uses ext3.

bfginger: It would be great if the Magic TV supported Power-up in standby. That would mean when the Magic TV was turned on from suspend mode there would be the option to have the hard drive's spindle only power up when needed. The hard drive often doesn't need to be on if the PVR is being used as a DVB-T receiver for the TV. Less use would reduce drive failures too.

There is a setting for Magic TV to spin down the system HDD when it is idle for several minutes.

(By the way, for reliability I actually prefer the HDD to spin constantly rather than spin up/down as needed. Personally I prefer Hitachi to WD or Seagate, as I don't mind HDD being loud. I just bought a Toshiba 3.5" 3TB HDD made by Hitachi for my desktop use.)